October 24, 2022

The church conundrum is back. Where to go, the parish 10 miles away in the next town, Simpsonville, or the one just three miles away in Taylors? It gets complicated quickly.

A generation ago, Catholics joined the parish within whose boundaries they lived. It never was a hard-and-fast rule, it just seemed that way. Like Protestants, they now go wherever they want, if they go at all.  

People go to church because, as they seek sustenance for faith, they hope they find something sublime: the sense that at the heart of life’s mysteries is something sacred, a presence that lifts spirits, offers peace to the restless heart, solace in moments of pain.

We may be awakened to faith by our parents, a spouse, a good priest or minister; by the unrelenting complexity and trauma of our lives. We may get it from the intellectual currents that underpin belief, from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, St. Augustine’s Confessions, or The Dark Night of the Soul of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross.

A Benedictine monk I knew for years said that all men have a contemplative aspect. If we ponder the nature of God (or whether there is one), we can dive deep in theology, to Aquinas’s radical argument: he writes, straining the limits of language and reason, God is pure act of existence—not an abstract idea or sentiment, but the act that forever creates and renews all that is real. If that notion makes us nervous we can steer clear and keep pondering.

Saint Mary Magdalene parish, 10 miles distant, is one of the largest in the state. Prince of Peace, just three miles, is pretty big, too. Both have plenty of parking.   

Protestants pick a church for many reasons: the pastor’s emphasis on Bible study; the tone and content of the services; the music; the fellowship; the convenience, among others. Here in the South many churches have a strong revivalist or evangelical flavor and offer a conversion or “born again” experience. It happens, sometimes with drama. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime, sometimes not.   

The spiritual content of the Catholic Mass is identical everywhere, in any venue or circumstance. The central event of the Mass, the “transubstantiation” of bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ, is the same when it’s performed in a hut in Africa, in a one-room frame church in Appalachia, or when the Pope presides at solemn High Mass, speaking in Latin, at Saint Peter’s in Rome.

So why drive 10 miles versus three miles? It’s something else. It must be.

Fewer people go to church than a generation ago, for many reasons. The Roman Catholic Church still struggles with its sex-abuse scandal. Millions stopped going. Same with Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention, like many Catholic bishops, tried covering up their sex-abuse cases, it didn’t work. Many are suffering the consequences.

The Eastern Rite Catholic denominations ordain married men to the priesthood. The Roman Catholic Church requires celibacy for priests. The current decline in numbers of priests has many causes, but celibacy probably is among them.  

Yet although the Church’s subterfuge and evasions about sexual assaults drove millions away, millions do still go to Mass. So do we. On landing in the Palmetto State we joined Mary Magdalene, meaning a 20-mile round trip on Sunday. Over time, though, we started thinking, why drive 20 miles when Prince of Peace is ten minutes away.

We attended Mass there two years ago, while visiting our daughter and son-in-law. Covid restrictions had relaxed at bit, but Virginia churches were still requiring masks and social distancing. The Prince of Peace service was a viral, or virus, free-for-all, no masks, no distancing, old folks crowding each other, coughing, sneezing. We got out fast.

I sent an email to the pastor. He answered: we’re doing what the bishop asked us, no more. I understood. The bishop (now retired) is an acolyte of the Republican governor, a Trump man, meaning sunny-side up on covid. At some point that year, South Carolina led the nation in covid childhood infections.

Yet a year later we joined Prince of Peace. Apart from the easier drive, I was intrigued by the ages-old liturgy, in which the priest faces away from the congregation, symbolically addressing Christ. It conveyed a powerful sense of the mystery of faith, the traditions of two millennia.

Most Catholic Churches accepted the declarations of the Second Vatican Council, held 1962-1965, which aimed at aggiornamento, a vast updating, or “throwing open the windows” of Catholic doctrine, teaching, and liturgy. Among them: greater dialogue with Protestants, Jews, and Muslims; use of the language of the congregation in place of Latin in the Mass; turning the priest around to face the congregation. It didn’t outlaw the old ways. Pastors were free to go either way.

The pastor of Prince of Peace sticks with the traditional rite. But when the associate pastor, a much older man, said Mass at the nearby Eastern Rite Maronite parish, he faced the congregation. I wondered why. The “traditionalist” pastor, when he said Mass over there, did not.

We try to look past the nuts and bolts, the personality quirks, to find the spiritual sustenance we seek. The older priest gives us that, Sundays and weekdays. Over time, we heard in the traditionalist pastor’s sermons mainly lectures on Church policy and politics, reminders about procedures and processes—do this, don’t do that. Not what we signed up for.

For the past two weeks we drove to Mary Magdalene. On Sunday, the pastor began by saying, “We are gathered here in the presence of Christ.” He told us his 105-year-old father had passed. “He has gone home to Jesus,” he said calmly. He was unable to travel to the funeral. Instead, he would say Mass at 10 PM for seven consecutive nights in his father’s memory.

Because we didn’t get to Prince of Peace, I picked up the weekly bulletin. The pastor’s letter reported on how busy he is. “For the past twelve years … we have done our utmost to accommodate people’s wishes as far as scheduling funerals, baptisms, and weddings … The sheer volume of funerals, baptisms, and weddings now has made what used to mean just a little extra coordination into a bit of a nightmare. … Something has to give.”

His next sentence also is true: “There are not more priests.” Yes. But what “has to give?” I don’t hear that at the other parish. Like everyone else, we need the spiritual message, not crankiness. So we’re looking at all this, again. And once again, it’s complicated.

October 3, 2022

It was nearly freezing at Wintergreen, Va., mid-30s, when we arrived mid-week. As we chugged up the three-mile-long mountain road to our rented place at nearly 3,600 feet of elevation, an adult black bear, probably 300 pounds, raced across the road in front of the van and disappeared into the woods. I jammed on the brake and drew a deep breath. We pushed on.

We settled in, got dinner at the nearly empty restaurant, the only one open of the three on the premises. We then shivered in our sweaters.

The next morning the sun rose gloriously above the mountains, the air was autumn-crisp and clear, we could see through the legendary, delicate blue mist for 100 miles.  Then we watched the hurricane reports as Floridians waited for Ian, far from home or sheltering in darkness.

The mountain resort colony of Wintergreen was nearly deserted, the serious foliage rush had not yet started. The silent majesty of the place and its wild surroundings offers a brief touch of serenity, but the hurricane news 850 miles south assaulted the abiding peace of the Shenandoah. Last Wednesday the National Weather Service radar map showed the storm whirling across central Florida then aiming north.

The sun shone on this eccentric spot on a mountain, a mid-grade ski resort—Vail or Killington it’s not. Wintergreen is a refuge for the affluent and semi-affluent who like some distance from their neighbors and love mountains, forests, and cold. Some of the homes are palatial three-level monsters perched on hillsides and concealed in dense treelines; others are modest, A-frames, Capes, ranches, just off the narrow roads.

We’ve been to the place a few times, the most recent more than two years ago (this blog, Feb. 3, 2020) to find a family vacation rental. We drove the 130 miles down from our Woodbridge place in the morning, then through the maze of Wintergreen roads most of the day. We thought we found a nice place, then trekked home and made the reservation. The pandemic showed up. Covid raged through the spring, we canceled, rescheduled, then canceled again.

The two years since then reacquainted us with sickness, tests, and surgeries. So now, back again to Wintergreen, this time from 400 miles to the south. We came in from the west, 30 exhilarating miles through pretty Fairfield and Vesuvius, then 25 more on the quietly gorgeous Blue Ridge Parkway.

We stepped outside the apartment that morning and gawked at the distant peaks and the wide valley, still splendid in summer green, then got coffee at the main lodge. We sat, just the two of us, in the cavernous, silent lobby. We looked at the rich paneling and stonework. A single clerk manned the front desk, no guests in sight. None of the fashionable shops were open.

We recalled the last visit: the crispness of winter air, the snow-crested mountains, the exotic, colorful outfits of the ski crowd, the happy cacophony of a dozen languages. We leaned over the railing at the lift and watched the skiers race down the slopes, then drove across the mountainside looking for that special spot.

It all seemed frozen in time. The rental unit, the stunning mountain views, the layout and décor of the visitor’s center, and the restaurant menu remained as we remembered them. We looked for a little while for the vacation house we rented twice. We didn’t save the address, but the image of the site lingered in our memories. Memory wasn’t enough.

We drove down into the valley to get lunch, managing the hairpin turns of Wintergreen mountain, taking in the vernal richness of rolling farmland, acres upon acres of corn that backed up to the surrounding Shenandoah. U.S. 151 winds north through the hamlets of Nellysford, Greenfield, and Avon, past vineyards, breweries, and churches to I-64 and Skyline Drive. Closer to sea level, the sun grew warm.

I hiked the Appalachian Trail near our rental. The Wintergreen stretch is narrow and heavily rocky and wound gracefully northwest away from the settlement. I spotted bear scat and paused, listened, and looked around, then leaned against a tree, taking in the magic and mystery of the woods. A through-hiker passed and smiled, we chatted. She moved on, I headed back. The storm was coming.  

We drove the 90 miles up the interstate to Bayse under gathering clouds. The Virginia governor had declared a state of emergency as the dregs of the storm approached, but the sun returned, the sky cleared. We tacked northwest to Mount Jackson then straightaway west on U.S. 263 toward West Virginia. The cornfields fell away, mountain forest closed in again.

We passed through tiny Mount Clifton and cruised through Bayse, an unincorporated place of a few businesses, truck-garden spreads, and hidden residential streets. We paused at Orkney Springs, site of Shrine Mount, a pretty complex of colonial homes converted to a retreat center by the Episcopal Church. The noon sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses, a few Episcopalians strolled about.

Back at Bayse, we walked a rugged mile, panting up steep slopes in that hidden spot just short miles from the West Virginia line and hundreds of miles from our South Carolina neighborhood. The quiet path prompted the questions that oldsters keep asking themselves about the past and the future, how we got here, what’s next, that kind of thing.

Dark clouds appeared, bringing a cold rain. We slogged back, fortified in a small way by closing on the boundaries of wild places. The forest will turn brown and gray and frigid winds will rush in. Winter is coming. We pressed on.

September 26, 2022

Bayse, Va., is west of the Massanutten Range just south of Front Royal and Strasburg. For us, that means I-81 from Johnson City, Tenn., for roughly 350 miles of mountains, farmland, and small country churches.

Five interstate highways, 10, 40, 70, 80, and 90 cross the country. I-81 really is just a spur, at 850 miles, from just east of Knoxville to the Canadian border. It’s long enough.

In 2011 we drove south on I-81 late at night. Near Wytheville, Va., the wind howled, the rain pounded the windshield. Eighteen wheelers were pulling to the shoulder, the highway was dark, no headlights in front of or behind us. We saw the marquee of a La Quinta Inn and got off. The desk clerk’s face was pale. We got lucky, they had a room. Thunder crashed, rivers and lakes formed in the parking lot. Then it was quiet.

Back on the interstate the next morning, we saw shattered and twisted trees, barns, sheds, homes. The news reported a tornado, then several, up and down the I-81 corridor. It was the same on the way back a few days later along that stretch. Destruction for miles.

2011 is a lifetime ago, the images remain. Earlier, every year starting in 2006 and through 2017 we drove from northern Virginia to Nashville in April to visit family and friends. We passed and or stopped at familiar places, around the Shenandoahs, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Natural Bridge north of Roanoke, and Blacksburg, Marion, Abingdon, Bristol. Then Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Crossville, Cookeville, Lebanon. We both were working and healthy.

In those years we didn’t look forward more than a few days. Everything is different now. Our Nashville friends moved away. Others, Sandy’s family, face health problems, work transitions and challenges. The city is not the same city we moved from years ago, not the same city we visited for years afterward.

Now forward is all that matters. Grandkids have something to do with that. In ten years the older boy will graduate from high school. I’d like to attend the ceremony. The U.S. Navy is building a new class of submarines that will stay in service until 2080. We know where we’ll be then.

For now, I-81 still draws us. Heading north from Greenville, S.C., it’s U.S. 25 to I-26 to Asheville, then through the empty country and dark peaks of western North Carolina and East Tennessee, through Erwin and Unicoi to 81 just past Johnson City. The Virginia state line is another 20 miles, opposite the fabulous Tennessee Welcome Center, which offers eloquent lessons in the state’s tumultuous history and rough-hewn culture. On the southbound side is an enormous neon-lit cross fronting a modest Baptist church. You would know you’re in Tennessee.

Northbound is a slog for a while. Beyond Bristol the road descends into the remoteness of the rugged, depressed stretch to Abingdon. The coal mines have closed, factories shut down, young people have left. Grayson Highlands State Park outside Wilson is spectacular. Years ago when the kids were small we spent a week at Hungry Mother State Park near Marion, a quiet spot next to a pretty lake.

Interstate 81 at times resurrects memories, long dormant, of both happy and grieving trips in both directions. The broken white lines and mile markers blur and disappear over miles and more miles. One exit stays in my mind, “Rural Retreat,” which we’ve never explored. A sense of our Virginia world turns up around Radford and Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech. The highway drags towards Salem and Roanoke.

Along this lonely stretch are connections to the Blue Ridge Parkway, which soars through the Shenandoahs for maybe 100 miles to a place called Rockfish Gap, west of Charlottesville, where it becomes Skyline Drive, showing off some of Virginia’s breathtaking vistas, rolling, deep valleys and soaring Appalachian peaks.

North and west of Roanoke is hot-springs country, where pricey spas nestle near isolated coal towns. Years ago I took U.S. 220 from I-81 through tiny, cut-off hollows to Hot Springs. Suddenly the forest opened up at The Homestead, a spa and golf resort planted in the middle of almost nowhere—except that The Greenbrier, another mecca for affluent steambathers and massage-seekers, is only 40 miles away in Warm Sulphur Springs, West Va.

I can’t remember when, exactly, but I went to business meetings at both. The contrast, ramshackle shacks and soaring white columns, boarded-up stores and sweeping green fairways rattles the nerves.

We take turns at the wheel, plodding through the mountains to the piedmont’s rolling green hills, deeper into the Old Dominion. The change is from hardscrabble southwest, really still the Deep South, to the tragedy-racked heart of the state, where Yankees and rebels fought at New Market and Winchester then, further east, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Petersburg, Richmond, where the war’s end was decided and the course of American history recharted.

Coming north to our old Virginia place over three decades, we’d leave 81 where it meets I-64-East at Staunton, then turn north at Charlottesville. Another two hours on state roads would land us in Prince William County. We still have the route memorized. Now, though, it’s 81 only. The pitch of the landscape smooths a bit before the Massanuttens rise gradually to the east. The 100-mile-long ridge looms past New Market and three pretty towns, Edinburg, Woodstock, and Toms Brook.

The suburbs begin to show up with the fast-food joints and the ubiquitous Sheetz multi-pump gas and grocery outlets. Suddenly majestic Signal Knob mountain appears, a beacon to Strasburg, then Front Royal, then I-66 to Washington. The American South ends at Front Royal. But I-66 crosses the Appalachian Trail at Markham. Still deep-forest, rocky country.

Just past Strasburg the D.C. rush hour reaches out 50 miles, the left-lane traffic blasts past us. The mountains, becoming hills, are in the rear-view mirror. Woodbridge, where we ended our long Virginia tour when dreams expired, is an easy run. It rates a drive-by, a short one. We look south now. I-81 is our escape route, all those miles to a complicated future in a still-complicated place, to respite, the final act, salvation.   

September 19, 2022

The floor sander weighed more than 100 pounds, easily. The Home Depot Rental Center staff, a young woman and an older guy, lifting together, loaded it in the van. I bought four strips of coarse sandpaper. At home I took a deep breath and eased the machine down to the driveway and pushed it through the backyard. As I heaved it up the two steps onto the deck I felt an ugly twinge in my back. I knew then this is a two-man job. I was short one man.

The deck is about 10 feet by 10 feet, accessible from the house through a sliding glass door to the kitchen. Sunlight streams through the door into the kitchen. The deck is old and rickety, the paint chipping, the nails popping. It cried out for top-to-bottom refinishing, or the junkyard. A short few months ago we thought it could become a sunroom, providing more living space, brightness, and warmth.

Sunrooms are popular. Who doesn’t love sprawling in an easy chair or on a soft sofa, feeling the bright rays bathe the body in nature’s gentle warmth, even through the summer’s choking humidity or winter’s icy winds? Everyone loves sunrooms, the cheery, wide-windowed spaces on the bright side of the house. That is, on some houses. Ours doesn’t have one.

No, it’s true, we don’t have one. In the plodding melodrama of our lives, really, it’s a small thing. Meanwhile, we’re stunned every day, like everyone else, by the relentless history beyond our modest foothold in this place. Floods and fires ravage the nation, stock prices plummet, interest rates spiral upward. Covid is returning, the country is torn by political anger. The world is wracked by war, millions suffer.

Yet still—we all push on, trying our best to move our own worlds forward and make our dreams come true; to do something concrete and creative, to leave a mark, great or humble, that will remain beyond our time, something others can point to and even enjoy.

Some try to write a book, paint a landscape, plant a garden, something maybe only our families will remember. In the suburbs we have a natural avenue, both ambitious and mundane: fix up our little nests. Moving into a new home juices the feeling. You like it but it still could use something, a fresh coat of paint, new kitchen or bathroom fixtures, drapes, curtains. Or a sunroom. Our kids’ homes have sunrooms. So do our most of our friends’ homes. When we visit we sit in their lovely, sunny spaces and wonder, could this be ours?

It took us months to make up our minds to sell our Virginia house and move. Inertia paralyzed us, reinforced by years of doing the same things in the same place. It set in again here. We looked on as neighbors and family took on ambitious projects, and wondered.

Months sped by, eventually we stepped up. Three contractors gave us sunroom proposals ranging from $41,000 to $21,000. The high one was from a big homebuilding outfit that wouldn’t notice our business and probably didn’t want it. We didn’t respond, the firm didn’t bother calling back. The low-bid guy pitched a semi-back porch framed with uninsulated plastic windows that he called a “three-season” space. We guessed he knew he would be the low bidder.

We liked the third guy, his bid seemed reasonable. We would have tweaked it. The HOA would rule on the design. That could take a while. But he said that supply-chain problems meant long delays for materials, and anyway he was backed up with work for months. We didn’t commit. His bid simmered for a while, then went cold.

So did our excitement about our bold stroke. A sunroom would add square footage, but we would lose the outdoor space and the spray of sunlight into the kitchen. We wondered what else we could do with the thousands of dollars the sunroom would cost. Our daughter said we could travel the world. It wasn’t in the budget when we moved. Meanwhile health-care costs are rising 8 percent per year.

Ten years ago, in Virginia, I built a 30-foot-long patio with concrete bricks. It took four months, but was indestructible. I sat out there on many evenings, taking in nature. Over time the backyard hill eroded a bit and dirt leached onto the bricks, some of which buckled. But it was mine.

We looked again at the deck with kinder eyes. We could refinish and rebuild it, make it immortal. We could enjoy fresh air and sunlight outside.

Back to the sander: I fastened a sandpaper strip in place and pressed “Start.” The engine roared and tore into the deck surface. I shut it off and caught my breath, the sander vibrated to a stop and keeled over. I peered at the underside, the paper was torn by protruding nails I didn’t notice.

I righted the machine, grasped the handle and pushed “Start” again.  It bucked forward and chewed at the rough floor, pulverizing the surface and the faded decades-old blue paint, dust shooting in all directions. I kept pushing, weaving slowly across the deck to the railing. I backed up and ploughed over the same boards a second time, leaving a whitened, smoothed path through the rough wood.

After navigating the sander in rows across the entire deck I hauled my leaf blower from the garage and blasted away the thick lines of dust, which blew back in my eyes and nose and coated me head to toe. I replaced the worn sanding strip and steered across the deck again. The sander whined, the paint turned to dust. Back and forth, back and forth, through the ear-splitting din. I hit another nail that tore the paper. I replaced it and kept going. In 90 minutes the worn deck floor looked whitened, beaten, smoothed.

I turned the machine off and leaned on the railing, sweating and covered with dust. The deck edges the sander couldn’t reach were untouched, awaiting long hours of hand finishing.

The sander was due back at the Depot in an hour. I stumbled inside. Sandy helped me lift it into the van. We headed back down the interstate. Outside the Rental Center a staff guy waved. “It’s in the van,” I said. Together we lifted the machine onto the parking lot. I thanked him, we drove away.

Later that afternoon I used the leaf blower to blow away the remaining dust, revealing most of the surface, now ground cleanly to bare wood. Months of work remains, but this much is done. The sunroom? Maybe next year. Maybe not.

September 12, 2022

Italy’s Amalfi coast is supposed to be lovely. So is Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan peninsula. Just two weeks ago two of our children were visiting both. We have friends now visiting Palermo, Italy. So where are we going?

Many of us yearn to jet off to faraway places, to see Europe’s great museums, cathedrals, and castles, to cruise the Rhine to Strasbourg and the Danube to Vienna. We hope to stroll past the Coliseum in Rome and climb the Eiffel Tower and China’s Great Wall. The plaintive, beautiful tune, “You Belong to Me,” sung by multiple artists back to Jo Stafford’s sweet tones in 1952, says it all:

“See the pyramids along the Nile … watch the sun rise on a tropic isle … fly the ocean in a silver plane … see the jungle when it’s wet with rain …”  You close your eyes and listen, and think, I have to do that, I have to go. 

Click here for link.

The rolling hills and rich green fields of Prince Edward Island run down to rocky beaches along the island’s northern coast, which faces the rich blue Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The rural roads are nearly empty even when they pass through tidy, peaceful villages. Tall steeples of old churches break the horizon. In fall 2010 we drove around the island, stunning in its beauty. We stayed near the fictional Ann of Green Gables home. Most restaurants and hotels had shut down for winter, but we managed.

The urge to travel is almost a law of nature for retired people. Travel is one of the things our nest eggs are for. In June we drove to Wyoming, then last month to New Jersey. New Jersey?  Why not a long plane ride to some exotic place? Our last plane trip was in June to New Hampshire for my college reunion. Last fall we flew to Colorado to visit our daughter. Before that, in July, we flew to Boston, rented a car and drove, again, to New Hampshire.

In the depths of covid, no one was flying. Before last summer I recall taking a plane to Seattle to see my sister and brother-in-law in 2019. It was winter. They no longer live there.

We got to London for the Farnborough Air Show in 1988 and to Paris for the Paris Air Show a year later, both were work trips. We saw some of the sights, London Bridge, St. Paul’s, the Eiffel Tower. For our 25th anniversary we went to Rome. At the Vatican we got close to the Pope (John Paul II, two popes back). I thought he looked me in the eye.  Sandy went back to Italy with her church choir. Our kids all have been to Europe, our son and daughter-in-law to Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, our daughters to Japan, Russia, and Peru.

I have been to some unique places. In the Marine Corps I spent a year on Okinawa because the Corps sent me, no fun and games. In Naha, the capital, I visited the sad memorial at the cliffs where Okinawans leaped to their deaths during the ferocious April-June 1945 battle. I rode a bike around the rugged northern end of the island where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. On leave I went to Taiwan and rode a train from Taipei to spectacular Sun Moon Lake and to mysterious Taichung City.

In 1980 I visited Nicaragua on the first anniversary of the Marxist-Sandinista revolution, while sporadic fighting continued. In the hotel bar I ate dinner with Sandinista soldiers who laid their automatic weapons on the tables while small-arms fire echoed outside. The capital, Managua, still was in ruins after the 1972 earthquake.

On my way to Managua I visited Guatemala in the middle of the country’s tragic 30-year civil war, when the military and vigilante armies fought Marxist guerrillas in the mountains. The then-president, General Lucas Garcia, was overthrown by yet another repressive general in 1982. A year later, I spent a week in Mexico City, inhaling its red-brown smog. I walked across the Plaza de la Constitucion, the Zocalo, and rode out to the Aztec pyramids. In the hotel a maid asked me for money, I gave her pocket cash. Poverty torments, even at the Marriott.

On the plus side, in June 2010 my son Michael and I went fishing on the Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We flew to Yellowknife by way of an overnight in Edmonton, Alberta, then in a pontoon plane to a wilderness camp. For four days we hauled in giant lake trout and northern pike from the near-freezing lake.

My siblings and our kids all have been to Ireland. Our daughter spent a year in college in Dublin, we never got there. It’s on the list. I’d like to see Oxford, England. On the domestic side, Sandy wants to go to Alaska. We haven’t set foot there or in Arkansas, Hawaii, Nebraska, or Oregon.

Cruises are big with some folks. We met a lady just back from a Viking cruise to the Adriatic coast plus Turkey, which she said she loved. The ship stopped at Dubrovnik in Croatia. Dubrovnik? Wikipedia calls it “one of the prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean.” We get the Viking brochures. I looked up the cruise: $4,600/person for the low-rent cabin, not counting airfare or tours ashore. We may not get there right away.

Some folks look at the world, or maybe just look at brochures or their National Geographics and sign up for their trips. They go with tour groups or in twos and threes or fours, or by themselves. They punch their tickets at interesting places but never go back. 

We have only so much time. We hope, like the wandering lover in “You Belong to Me,” to see the world and the infinite variety of God’s creation. But we listen one more time and realize the song isn’t about travel at all. Instead it expresses a woman’s generous love, an immensely greater gift than visits to the pyramids on the Nile and all monuments, museums, and cathedrals.

We go on talking about trips while living our lives, which now include an MRI to locate cancer. That and all our experiences fit together in some complicated, mystical way, as in the song’s apt title. The details fade into the swamp of daily life. We can fly off in the silver plane, or not. We all work hard to belong to each other. The trips are just sights along the way.